Musical.ly Marketing – Generation Z

Jack Ferrari - Agency Intern

13th July 2018

Musical.ly and Live.ly

Musical.ly is a global video community in which users can create and share video content. The app allows users to attach their favourite songs to the content allowing the user to lip-synch to all their favourite bangers. Musical.ly was launched in 2014 and has built a loyal following, after just four years the app has over 200 million users, 60 million of which are active users. The popularity is focussed among the younger demographic with the majority of the users being between the age of 13 and 24, this demographic is often referred to as ‘Generation Z’.

The developers of Musical.ly have now launched Live.ly in 2016 that allows users to broadcast their musical performances live from the comfort of their own home rather than uploading pre recorded videos on Musical.ly. Generation Z have grown up with ‘the selfie’ and so the concept of filming themselves live is not unusual. The application gained 4.6 million active users in just 3 months on iOS devices and is proving to be highly popular.

Musical.ly and influencer marketing

The combination of both Musical.ly and Live.ly presents a significant marketing opportunity for brands that target younger age groups however marketing on this platform is in the early stages and has not taken off yet. The application, Musical.ly, launched advertising on the platform in 2017 but Digiday reports that so far there has been little success from traditional advertising methods on the application. Traditional advertising methods are too direct and commonly do not gain any traction with Generation Z. Direct traditional advertising on Musical.ly is actually more likely to have a negative impact on the younger demographic’s synergy towards a brand. Cheetah Mobile’s Arthur Wu stated, “I think influencer marketing is a win-win-win strategy: Influencers make money, Musical.ly gets more creative, and advertisers get more impressions through good content.”

A large number of users have managed to create massive followings and are highly influential in their network. A list of the top 5 ranking users is shown below:

Disney, KitKat and Coca Cola have tapped into this powerful promotional platform and created highly successful influencer marketing campaigns. Generation Z love to engage with their influencer idols and marketing campaigns are incorporating this aspect. German skin care brand, Beiersdorf, used 5 influencers with 600,000 – 1.5m followers to market their ‘8×4’ branded new deodorant products, targeted at teens. The 8×4 brand released five different scents that were named after five animals; Cat, Toucan, Flamingo, Unicorn or Mermaid. The five influencers encouraged their following to engage with the brand and post videos with dance moves that emulate the animals with the #sprayandplay. In just five days this campaign generated 4,365 fans and 61,000 hearts on Musical.ly. This is just one example of an engaging Musical.ly marketing campaign.

The Drawback of Musical.ly Influencer Marketing

The only downside to influencer marketing on Musical.ly seems to be the lack of analytics and therefore the success of campaigns is harder to measure. The only analysis data so far is viewing comments and likes. Musical.ly will no doubt endorse more advertising on the platform however and eventually provide more in-depth analytics giving more accuracy when measuring the effectiveness of influencer marketing campaigns.